


And the Endless Summer

by a1army, momo_official



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Kylo Ren is a multidimensional being, Lord Help Me: I'm Back on My Bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 20:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12540404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a1army/pseuds/a1army, https://archiveofourown.org/users/momo_official/pseuds/momo_official
Summary: The strange thing that lived at Verity Pond, the thing that came out only for her, had never offered a name, maybe because he was far too ancient for such a thing. All she knew was that one day, she whacked her softball out into the center of the pond, and just as she was considering swimming for it, the pond threw it back to her: a clean, high arc, right into her waiting hands, just like a poltergeist.[Part of the Reylo Short Story Collection, Part II: The Choice.]





	And the Endless Summer

**Author's Note:**

> TOOK ME LONG ENOUGH TO POST THIS.
> 
> Inspired by "Night in the Woods," Massachusetts summers, and being eleven years old a long, long time ago.
> 
> May all your summers be endless.
> 
> Illustrations by the celestial @a1army on Tumblr. This story is best viewed in its full glory as part of the [Reylo Short Story Collection](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx8dPrfOck6yQ25QOV8xM0tLd1E/view#_=_)!

When Rey was eleven, all the teenagers liked to go to Verity Pond.

  
In the dark of night, they smoked weed and fucked and crushed beer cans on each other’s heads. The only time Rey could get some time to herself there was right after school, and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. Even so, she was alone when she first met the Poltergeist.

  
Granted, “Poltergeist” wasn’t his real name, as far as Rey knew. She liked to smuggle scary movies out of her parents’ bedroom while they worked third shift, and anyway “poltergeist” was the longest word she knew. But the strange thing that lived at Verity Pond, the thing that came out only for her, had never offered a name, maybe because he was far too ancient for such a thing. All she knew was that one day, she whacked her softball out into the center of the pond, and just as she was considering swimming for it, the pond threw it back to her: a clean, high arc, right into her waiting hands, just like a poltergeist.

  
Rey didn’t encounter it again until two weeks later, when she curled up on the gravel beach to cry because her parents were separating. As she sobbed and beat her fists against the ground, the spring breeze tousled her hair. It felt so gentle, just like how her mother used to brush her hair off of the back of her neck, that Rey cried harder and doubled over like big old Johnny Weldson in the eighth grade had just punched her in the gut. She swiped her cheeks with her fists and sniffled.

Right next to her, a red poppy sprouted up through the gravel. One by one, more poppies broke through the beach; like a fast-forwarded tape, they split open to reveal their insides, petals reaching out to her in a silent offering. Rey watched in awe as more poppies circled her, growing ten, twenty flowers thick around her body. The impossibility of the situation was somehow more comforting than the poppies themselves, as if the forest itself was closing her up in a fairy ring, away from divorce and money and her father’s weeping form over the dining room table, and it was wonderful, and it was terrifying, and Rey started laughing instead of crying for once. She picked the flowers as they sprouted, again and again, on Verity Pond’s gravel beach.

  
She made herself a poppy crown and wore it home. She let herself in using the key under the doormat, turned on all the lights, and made macaroni and cheese on the stove. In her empty house, she watched _The Mummy_ and ate the macaroni out of the pot, wearing her poppies with her pajamas. They were on her bedside table when she woke up, as fresh and red as ever.

  
But after school, when she returned to the gravel beach, all the flowers that had cradled her yesterday afternoon were gone, and Johnny Weldson was pissed at her when she found him necking with his girlfriend behind a tree on the way back. It was cold outside. Her bedside crown stayed eternally fresh.

  
In June, after the last day of school, Rey finally saw the Poltergeist.

  
She had dragged herself through the screaming kids and teachers handing out candy. A dodgeball hit her in the face in gym; she got in trouble when she threw it back twice as hard and broke Gene Fritz’s nose. Melissa Maeweather, the aforementioned Gene’s popular girlfriend, had called her a “mean bitch,” and so no one signed Rey’s yearbook as a punishment. Rey was angry and miserable, and didn’t anyone know that her parents had a fistfight over custody the night before? Didn’t anyone know that she was due for a summer all alone being a mean bitch with no friends? And the teenagers would keep necking and smoking at Verity Pond while she was doing all of this, so she figured she would go there for one last cry by herself before they came out for the night.

  
“What’s the matter?”

Rey looked up from her tear-soaked knees. A man stood in the trees at the edge of the beach, clad head to toe in black fur and robes. His hair tumbled in dark waves down to his shoulders. He stared at her with a blank but intent expression, as if studying her. A huge scar bisected his pale skin near his right eye.

  
“Who are you?” Rey asked. Then, “Go away.”

  
“Why are you crying?” The man jutted his chin towards her. “You’re all alone again.”

  
_Again?_   Rey turned to the pond. “Who wears fur in the summer?”

  
The man said nothing. She heard the gravel crunch from behind her, and then he settled down next to her with a sigh.

  
They sat for a while, watching the water lap against the beach. He smelled like wood smoke, like something out of time, and despite the heat, he didn’t sweat. Pond foam gathered in undulating patches on the shoreline.

  
He spoke again as the sun was going pink. “This place is mine, and you come here when you’re upset. Did you like my flowers?” His voice was slow, deep.

  
“The poppies?” Rey turned to him. His face was in profile to her, outlined in golden light. He looked young, just like the youngest teachers at her school. “How did you do that?”

  
“This place is mine,” he repeated. He looked almost bored as he watched the pond. He flicked his hand, and the water rose into a tiny wall, no taller than the garden wall around Rey’s house. She gasped and pushed herself away, gravel digging into her palms.

  
The man flicked his hand again, and the water settled without a splash. “What’s your name?”

  
“Rey,” she whispered at the pond.

  
“Very beautiful.” He looked up at the clouds, then looked away from her. His hair looked soft; she resisted the urge to touch it. “Why do you come here to cry?”

  
“‘Cause it’s quiet,” Rey said. She shook gravel off of her palms; when she looked down to inspect them, they were shaking. “And so my parents don’t see me before they go to work.”

  
“Does it help you to be alone?”

  
“Yeah.”

  
“Would you like me to leave?”

  
Rey thought for a while. “No.”

  
As the sun was rising, after the teenagers had gone home and her parents had stumbled, bleary-eyed, into bed after work, she visited Verity Pond, where the Poltergeist was always waiting. They wandered around the forest through the morning and into the afternoon. She welcomed every scratch of the tree branches on her ankles, every blot of sunburn and poison ivy, because these injuries were proof of her new friend, her only friend, something born from the forest itself. The Poltergeist wore his furs and robes no matter how hot it became.

  
June turned to July turned to endless August. He taught her how to forage for mushrooms, sang birdsong to her, even smiled, just a little, when she told him stories about school and about finding a switchblade on the beach once. He showed her the abandoned train tracks and power lines that cut through this part of Massachusetts. He let her hold his hand when they crossed the stream that cut the forest in half. Rey spent her summer reading to him in forest clearings while he stared up at the sky.

He was an odd friend, to be sure, never giving her a name or a life story, but he braided her hair and grew more poppies for her and told her stories about the forest, back when it was a sea teeming with life, and how the ocean dried up and trees began to sprout and people made their way in. It never rained when she was with him, only before or after. As the divorce ground on and money squeezed ever tighter, Rey cried on his shoulder and hid from the world beyond the maple trees. All she wanted was to bury herself in that ancient place forever.

  
And then August turned to September, and one morning on the beach, the Poltergeist sat her down as the sun was coming up and said something terrible:

  
“Little Rey, I have to go.”

  
Rey’s stomach bottomed out. She stared at him with her ears ringing. “Where?” is what she finally spat out. “Away,” he replied. He stared hard at the opposite end of the pond. Rey wished she were on that other shore, dancing with the Poltergeist, far far away from this moment.

  
He continued, “Everything is dying, Rey. I am dying, and so are you.”

  
Her hands were clammy. “What are you saying? What’s wrong with you?”

“And,” as if he hadn’t even heard her, “our time is at an end. It’s gone on too far already. As I sit here with you I’m dying, and everything is dying, and you are dying. And this place will come to an end, and there will be no more summers.”

  
“What’s going on?” The first hot tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her face. Rey clutched at his furs, but he didn’t move. “Who’s dying?”

  
His voice was calm, flat. “And everything is curling in on itself. You’ll only understand when you’re older.” He looked down at his boots, heaved a great sigh, and Rey wanted to hit him, to beat him to make him feel something other than the great nothingness he was throwing at her. Suddenly, every second they had spent together felt fake, as if someone had switched on a light in her head an thrown everything into awful relief. She remembered the poppy crown, still eternally beautiful on her bedside table, and wanted to crush it in her hands.

  
He stood; she sprung up with him. Rey shook him, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “Stop saying that. Stop it! You can’t leave.”

  
“I have to and I will.”

  
And here the Poltergeist turned to her, and the intensity in his eyes made her feel cold.

  
“But before everything dies, Rey, I will come back to you, and you will have to make a choice. You can live in an endless summer with me, in my forest, never to see your loved ones again. Or you can stay behind in your home, and be happy, and I will never see you again.”

“I choose the summer,” she gasped through her tears. She hit his chest with her fists; he didn’t even flinch. “I want to stay with you! ”

  
The Poltergeist backed away. “You can’t know that yet. You will know when it is time. But I have to go, Rey.”

  
“Stop!”

  
“Be well.”

  
“What am I going to do?” she screamed. Rey fell to her knees against the gravel beach. The Poltergeist turned towards the trees. “Who’s going to be my friend?”

But he said nothing, and walked into the trees, and disappeared, and that was the last time she saw the Poltergeist on Verity Pond’s gravel beach when she was eleven years old in the summertime.

She fell to her knees and yelled after him. “Come back! Come back! ” The tears ripped her throat apart, reduced her to a blubbering mess. Before long, Rey resorted to simply yelling, “Poltergeist! POL-TER- _GEIST_! ” three angry syllables, spat out with all the hate in her tiny body, since if the Poltergeist left her here, the forest was no longer protecting her, in fact absolutely _no one_ was protecting her anymore, and she didn’t have family and she didn’t have friends. She dissolved into screaming wordless anger into the air. Somewhere in this chaos, she thought, _It would have been nice of him to warn me,_ as if there were a kind way to say, _I’d rather not see you anymore_ , a Ms. Manners version of _I’m dying and so are you._ Rey screamed and screamed until someone yelled, “Shut the fuck up!” from the woods, and she had to go home.

  
When she woke the next morning, the poppy crown had withered away. Gray petals floated off her nightstand onto the table. Rey wondered if it had always looked like this: her fervent wish for a friend blinding her until she was seeing magical flowers and a man in black robes singing lullabies to her.

  
_I’m too old for imaginary friends._

  
And something finally went out in her. She brushed the dead poppies into the trash.

  
Rey didn’t go back to Verity Pond after that. Instead of friends and boys, she pressed her nose to her books and didn’t look up until it was summer again and she had straight A’s for the year, and the divorce was finalized. She took up odd jobs helping neighbors weed their gardens; in the fall, it was raking leaves; in the winter, shoveling. Rey grew older and older, and her classmates fell in love and applied to colleges and they too went to Verity Pond to party, but all she could do to keep herself alive was work in the local hardware store and do calculus. No one wanted her: she was “mean bitch” until freshman year of high school, until someone called her “Rey with the small tits” and that stuck for a while, and after _that_ , “frigid bitch” was her name. College brochures about engineering programs were her best friends. Some of her classmates made feeble attempts at being her friend, but just like the Poltergeist, everyone eventually left her alone.

  
In the dark of her bedroom, she had strange, wobbly dreams about a man with dark hair kissing her all over, dreams that got her panting and hot. At fifteen one of those dreams came with sound, the Poltergeist’s voice saying _Rey, Rey, Rey,_ and she woke up coming, confused and elated. There was guilt in those dreams as well: in her waking life, the Poltergeist never saw her in that way, never reached a hand to her unless she said it was okay, and he certainly never touched her inappropriately. She hated herself for those dreams. That guilt became shame, and then anger at herself, and then anger at the Poltergeist, and when she was seventeen she rubbed herself against her pillows, imagining she was riding him until he cried and begged her for release. In the first year of college, she had several angry fucks with nameless dark-haired boys who loved it when she hit them and called them names. “You’ll never leave me,” she said to them, even if she deleted their numbers the next day. “You’re mine forever,” even if she pretended she never knew them afterwards. They were a poor  
substitute for the real thing.

  
And then her mother died in a car crash.

  
And then her father became ill.

  
And then Rey was the only one in the family who could earn money. And then Rey dropped out of school to look after her father.

  
The town had melted over the years, but it was only after Rey came home that she finally noticed how ghostly it was: the shuttered storefronts, the broken-down houses, the old men sitting on their front porches in their old factory uniforms. Her home had always been blue-collar country, but this was something else.

  
She spoonfed her father at six AM, waited for the nurse to arrive, then once she was there, Rey suited up and went to work at the local diner for eight hours. After _that_ , she changed in the bathroom into her gas station uniform, drove home to feed her father again and put him to bed, and worked at the gas station convenience store until two AM. For the first couple of months, she made a feeble attempt at online classes, but once her father’s memory started to go, she abandoned them.

  
Rey despised the cloudy blankness in her father’s eyes as she fed him oatmeal; she despised the nurse’s smiles and gentle reassurances. She despised the smell of her father’s bed sheets, his food supplements, the isopropyl tang of his pill bottles. She wasn’t sure if she liked anything anymore. She lost herself in the grind of her day-to-day life, and at night she fell asleep and dreamed of the Poltergeist leaving her on the beach.

  
As winter came and her father declined further, she called out of work and took a morning walk. The sun was bright despite the temperature being no higher than thirty degrees. Ice gathered on the sidewalk’s edges. When Rey finally ventured into the grass, it crunched underneath her feet. A wooden sign at the edge of her town said VERITY POND and, below that, sported a rude carving and someone’s initials. She picked her way through cigarette butts. Her heels slid in the dirt path; she windmilled her arms to steady herself and swore quietly.

The gravel beach, _her_ gravel beach, had always been a little out of the way, but the shrubbery between it and the hiking trail was well worn. She kicked a Natty Light can out of the way. The forest was dark here; everything was brown and quiet.

  
Rey emerged onto the beach. Someone had torn down the trees on the opposite shore; a large orange sign on the edge was unreadable this far away, but she assumed it had something to do with the new highway exit coming in. Parts of the lake had frozen into thin, clear ice. A flock of geese honked above her as they passed.

  
Her father would be dying soon. The nurse said it would be a few more months.

  
There were more cigarette butts here, hidden among gravel shards. She nudged them with her toe to bury them.

  
Rey would finally, finally be alone.

  
She sat down and hugged her knees to her chest.

  
Time passed. The sun rose higher in the sky; the wind picked up and nipped at her frayed coat, pulled at her loose brown hair. She was distantly aware of a bleeding cut on her ankle from where a tree branch had gotten her.

  
The gravel crunched behind her. Someone was there.

  
She didn’t turn, but she felt the Poltergeist’s presence behind her like a gravity well. Smoke filled her nose.

  
She said with a laugh, “I’m not crying this time.”

  
“I know.”

  
He sat down next to her. They watched the pond. She didn’t dare turn to face him, as if he would evaporate if she looked right at him.

  
“Why did you leave?” whispered Rey.

  
The Poltergeist sighed. “I was here for too long. It’s like holding your breath. Any longer, and I might have died, and then who would have protected you?”

  
“You weren’t there anyway.”

  
He didn’t reply to that. Rey stood up and kicked the gravel, still not looking at him.

  
“I thought for a couple years that you were some pervert who lived in the woods and followed little girls around,” she said. “When I got older, it all seemed weird.”

  
“You thought I would hurt you?” There was genuine pain hidden deep under the Poltergeist’s words.

  
“I don’t know,” she said bitterly. “You hurt me anyway. In other ways.”

  
The Poltergeist stood up, drew himself to his full height. “Rey.”

  
And she finally looked at him, and he hadn’t changed an ounce, as if he was cut out from the fabric of her mind and placed in front of her. There was the dark hair, and the scar on the young face, and the furs that lifted gently in the wind. There were the brown eyes that blinked placidly at her, only now his blank stare seemed sad and tired.

  
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.

  
Rey felt her throat close. “Where did you _go_?”

  
“Home.” He didn’t move to touch her. “And now, Rey, you can come with me, if you’d like.”

  
Rey reached out towards his chest, stopped just shy of the furs there. He watched her, so patient and quiet, and it was here that she began to cry.

  
“My dad’s dying,” she gasped. “And I’m gonna be stuck here.” Her hands trembled. An inch further, and she could have touched him. “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

  
“Think, Rey,” he murmured. “Do you want to live with me? Or would you rather stay?”

  
To this she finally leaned forward, reaching up just so on her toes, and pressed her lips to his. He didn’t move. Her tears fell down her cheeks and plopped onto the furs and robes between them.

  
When she pulled away, his eyes were closed. The permanent line in his brow had finally smoothed over.

  
She whispered, “Yes.”

“You won’t see your father again,” he said. He clenched his fists, released them. “You can’t ever come back here.” 

  
“I know.” She took his hands in hers. His gloved hands swallowed hers up and became warm shields against the bitter cold. “I always wanted to go with you.”

  
The Poltergeist opened his eyes and smiled at her, shy and affectionate. “You told me so.”

  
A summer wind brushed her hair from the back of her neck. She looked away from the Poltergeist, towards the opposite shore, where the trees had grown back in. Everything around them was lush and green. Birds sung in the trees. The water whispered against the gravel beach. The air smelled like a New England summer– like wildflowers and a hint of gasoline.

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Tumblr: @envysnest  
> Artist's Tumblr: @a1army


End file.
